Podcasts are ruining my marriage

IT SOUNDS dramatic, I know. But my husband is so obsessed with podcasts I’m having to speak in double speed to be heard.

The rise of podcasts in the last few years has many people hooked — to the detriment of their actual relationships. Picture: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

PODCASTS are ruining my marriage.

I know that sounds dramatic, but if you’ve ever listened to one of these boring talkathons, I’m waging you love a bit of drama. I mean, they pore over every minuscule, gory detail of rapes and murders under the pretence of “unearthing an unsolved case” and millions love to listen to them do it. I don’t see how it’s any different to reading pulp fiction.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me start at the beginning. If this were a podcast, now’s the part where the eerie, murderous music would begin playing. The year was 2016. Everyone was wearing fake Gucci and tiny sunglasses. It was the same year my husband began his love affair with podcasts. “Just for the commute to work” he told me.

He found most of these podcasts via Twitter, where every halfway intelligent hipster is recording his “exclusive” with his mate, calling it a podcast and tweeting about it. Podcasts are the white man’s mix tape, after all.

Soon, my husband was freebasing all over the place, taking in up to five podcasts a day on politics, murder, history and current events. And it was no longer confined to his commute. Sometimes, when he arrived home after work, it was a full 15 seconds before he took out his earbuds. The only reason, he assured me, was “because they’ve taken an hour to get to make this point.”

I was so naive — and so contemptuous of podcasts — I believed him.

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Months passed. More podcasts were thrown into conversation. It was his number one source. I could always tell when he had just listened because he’d talk in a rapid pattern, as if he had a producer telling him he only had 10 minutes to convey that the real reason they shot Bobby Kennedy had more to do with CIA interference and the LAPD than I could imagine.

Then, it happened. One morning I began my usual b*tching about whoever I thought was an idiot that day. I was probably no more than 10 seconds into my rant when I saw it — the earbud. He had been listening to a podcast and only pretending! Faking his concern about my tirade.

They might look like tiny tampons hanging from your ears but that doesn’t mean I won’t notice them. Picture: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

The betrayal was deep. He swore it was the first time. Again, I believed him. And why shouldn’t I? Podcasts had popped up everywhere. If you weren’t on one, you were making one, or listening to one. Podcasts about murder. Podcasts about cooking. Podcasts about politics, fashion, pop culture, comedy. Podcasts about how to survive as a mum listening to podcasts.

You couldn’t say anything longer than a sentence anymore without someone telling you “Hahaha, that should be a podcast!”

My most pompous and least self-aware friends were no longer updating their Facebook status but test-running narratives for their podcasts. Whenever I went to read anything online I was interrupted — not by advertising — but by podcasts. And I had had enough.

“What is the point,” I raged to my husband one day early this year, “of listening, passively to a conversation I’m not a part of?”

He smirked at me and I knew then that I was doomed.

Not long after, our conversations changed. If I could not summarise a story about my day in less than 15 seconds, he drifted. Concerned, I began to ask him how he put up with listening to people go on for hours if he couldn’t abide this from me. “Oh it’s easy” he replied. “I listen to it on double speed.”

“I see,” I sniffed, but he was already giving me the wind-up signal. Apparently, it’s common — nobody listens to podcasts on anything less than double speed, although some — including my husband — will go for triple. And it wrecks lives, because everyone appears slow and poorly edited in contrast. Soon, those addicted find themselves yelling, “Get to the point” when all you’ve said is, “Good morning.”

As for my husband, he’s hardly alone. Men (and not a few women and children) have, for centuries, pursued ways in which they can actively tune out their loved ones. Today it’s podcasts. But it used to be TV, and before that, newspapers. In this sense, my marriage is no more doomed than anyone else’s. But that’s probably because I’ve learned to speak at double-speed.

Natalie Reilly is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Twitter: @thatnatreilly